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How to Install Twitalytic on DreamHost

Posted: August 22nd, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Tech | 6 Comments »

TwitalyticOne of my biggest frustrations with Twitter is that archives only go back 3,200 tweets, meaning that for now the entire first half of my Twitter history is totally inaccessible to me and everyone else. So I was pretty excited when blogger and hacker Gina Trapani announced her then-unnamed Twitalytic project.

Twitalytic—which Gina released as an alpha this week—is a PHP application that combats the disappearing tweet problem by archiving your tweets, plus all replies to them and all mentions of your Twitter name, and along the way aggregates meaningful data about your relationships, all on your own server.

Of course I set it up as soon as I got a chance. I could have installed it on one of my home machines, but I decided to put it on my public web space, which happens to be hosted on the cheap by DreamHost (disclosure: affiliate link). Being alpha software and pretty untested, setting Twitalytic up on DreamHost didn’t go entirely smoothly, but I got it working eventually. Since I’m sure others are struggling with the same task, I wrote up the method I used to get it working:

How to install Twitalytic on DreamHost.

I posted the instructions on Twitalytic’s GitHub wiki because I want other people to be able to improve and correct them, so if you see any errors or potential clarifications or simplifications, please edit the article and improve it.

P.S. Gina enthusiastically thanked me for posting the tutorial, but it’s worth quoting what she wrote on the Twitalytic home page: “Do not run on a public, production server. You have been warned.” Nevertheless, if you’re as determined to set it up as I was (and perhaps as foolish), I hope my instructions are useful to you.

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6 Comments on “How to Install Twitalytic on DreamHost”

  1. 1 Chris Pugh said at 5:51 pm on August 26th, 2009:

    Hello! Thanks for the tutorial on installing twitalyic on a dreamhost acount.

    When creating the symbolic link I run the command as shown and it appears to work, meaning I’m not given any error messages, but when I try to cd into the tweets directory I get “No such file or directory” message. If I cd into the twitaliyc/webapp directory I can see the link created there.

    Maybe you can point me in the right direction?

  2. 2 Jordan said at 8:51 pm on August 26th, 2009:

    I’m not sure, Chris. I just noticed that in the tutorial I typed “webapps” a few times when it should have been “webapp.” Perhaps that caused you to mistype it as well?

  3. 3 Chris said at 10:39 pm on November 22nd, 2009:

    I can’t do step 10 because something seems to be wrong with my symbolic link. Firefox just gives me a 404 Not found message. I’m not sure what might be the problem? None of the other steps had any problems.

  4. 4 Jordan said at 10:45 pm on November 22nd, 2009:

    Sorry, other Chris–I’m not sure what the problem is. Probably the tutorial should be redone without the symlinks, they seem to trip a few people up.

  5. 5 eapen said at 10:29 pm on January 5th, 2010:

    I corrected the symbolic link code on the Wiki – it needed to be the other way round.
    i.e. ln -s ~/webapp ~/yourdomain.com/tweets

    But I still get a forbidden error :-(

  6. 6 Andrew Becker said at 10:06 pm on July 5th, 2010:

    I use Backupify for my backups. It does Twitter, Gmail, Flickr and some others.

    Though I’m all about setting stuff up on my own. Sometimes it’s easier to just use a pre-made solution for the issue.

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